Settings — Languages & Profiles

A Language Profile describes what subtitles a series or movie is allowed to receive: which target languages, in what priority order, with what minimum quality bar. Profiles are reused across many items, so changing one profile updates every assigned series at once.

The default profile

Every Sublarr install ships with a Default profile that applies to any series without an explicit assignment. Tune the Default to match what you’d expect for the bulk of your library; create custom profiles for the edge cases.

Setting	Default	Values	Effect
Languages (priority)	de, en	ISO 639-1 codes	Sublarr searches in this order; first hit that beats the cutoff wins.
Cutoff score	4.0	0.0 – 10.0	Stop searching once a subtitle scores above this — saves provider calls.
Hearing impaired	prefer-not	prefer-not / require-not / require / any	Bias for or against [Music]-style HI tags.
Forced	prefer-not	same shape	Bias for “forced” subtitles (only translates foreign-language scenes).
Must contain	empty	comma-separated tokens	Reject subtitles whose filename doesn’t contain ALL listed tokens.
Must not contain	empty	comma-separated tokens	Reject subtitles whose filename contains ANY listed token.
Upgrade enabled	on	toggle	Replace existing subtitles with better-scoring ones when found.

Custom profiles

Click New profile to create a named profile. Each is independent — copying the Default first then tweaking is the fast path:

Common profile	Use case
Anime — DE	Languages de, en, must-contain Erai-raws,SubsPlease, HI prefer-not.
Western — DE	Languages de, cutoff 5.0, HI require-not.
Movies — Original	Languages en, de, cutoff 6.0, must-not-contain dubbed,sync.

Assigning a profile

Profiles only apply when assigned. Two assignment surfaces:

Surface	Granularity
Library → Series detail → Profile dropdown	Per-series.
Library → bulk select → Set profile	Many series at once.

A series with no explicit assignment uses the Default profile.

Languages priority order

Order matters: Sublarr searches the first language; if a result clears the cutoff, search ends. If not, it falls through to the next language. So de, en means “prefer German; fall back to English when German isn’t available or doesn’t meet the bar”.

Order	Behaviour
de, en	Looks for German first. Falls back to English. Most users want this.
de	Only ever downloads German. Misses don’t fall back.
en, de	English-first. Useful if you actively prefer English.

Cutoff score

Search-and-download is bounded by the cutoff. Higher = stricter:

Cutoff	Effect
0.0	Take literally any match — useful for niche shows where any subtitle is better than none.
4.0 (default)	Sane baseline — accepts most reasonable matches, skips obvious junk.
6.0	Tight — rejects anything not from a top-ranked release group.
8.0+	Very tight — useful for Premiere/Blu-ray sources where you have multiple high-quality candidates.

Scoring is documented in detail at Settings → Subtitles → Scoring.

Must-contain / must-not-contain rules

Token-based filename filters that run after scoring but before downloading:

Rule	Meaning
Must contain Erai-raws	Reject any subtitle whose filename doesn’t include Erai-raws. Useful for stamp-of-quality sources.
Must not contain sync	Reject anything advertising itself as “sync” or “synced” — those are usually bad.
Must contain Erai-raws,SubsPlease	Reject unless filename contains BOTH tokens. ANDed, not ORed.

Wildcards are not supported — entries are case-insensitive substring matches.

HI / Forced bias

Hearing-impaired (HI) subtitles include sound descriptions like [Music]. Forced subtitles only translate scenes in foreign languages (e.g. alien dialogue in a movie otherwise in your language).

Mode	Effect
prefer-not	If a non-HI version exists at any score, prefer it. Score-tie-break against HI version goes to non-HI.
require-not	Hard reject HI subtitles. Use when post-processing strips HI tags poorly for your language.
require	Only download HI. Useful for assistive viewing.
any	Score is the only deciding factor; HI vs non-HI is treated as equal.

Series-level overrides

Per-series tweaks live on the Library → Series detail → Profile dropdown. Beyond just picking a profile, each series can override a single field (e.g. a different cutoff for a notoriously poorly-subtitled show) without forking a whole new profile. The override badge appears next to the profile name when set.

Migration from older Sublarr

Older installs called these “Language Profiles” with a smaller field set. The current schema is a strict superset — old profiles import 1:1 with new fields populated from the Default values.